Flesh Over Fire
by Abraxas Qlippoth
Summary: AU/AR  A fisherman of the very distant future uncovers a book written by a historian about Fire Lord Zuko's reign and the tragedies that surrounded his life.


**"Flesh Over Fire"** by **Abraxas** 2010-11-03

The sky was a yellow, red canvas, tainted with clouds. The ocean was a palette of azure, jostled by wave. It was yet another lazy afternoon at the archipelago.

The raft came onto the island - a crop of green buffered with a stretch of sand. Licked by flames of vast, endless surf, it seemed to be that dream-like outpost of land, beyond which the universe was ocean. It was a picture of tranquility, which belied the truth - that it used to be a much, much larger island until a volcano obliterated its history from the common memory of man.

The fisherman spread a web of hooks about the cove.

The island was uninhabited, to be sure, although from time to time he saw fragments of what used to be a house eke through the dirt.

The fisherman trekked the island, wadding its rough and jagged coasts, stopping to explore its shelters. He gazed at what life spawned at the water. At the birds that dived into the water. At the animals that poked out of the earth. A vibration of the ancient was struck by the working of the island - the drama that revealed itself to the eye appeared as it would have a million years ago, perhaps, as it was destined to be a million years to come...

The world that birthed him vanished at the edge of that island and, so, he enjoyed its secret, hidden sanctuary and the paradise it offered.

Then - a step revealed a sink. At first shallow, then, breath-by-breath, the hole deepened and threatened to drag the fisherman into its void. The stranger struggled out of the pit, flailing and clutching at the sides of the shaft, at anything to break the fall and aid the climb.

Free, the fisherman looked at the sink as its shaft collapsed.

The interloper realized he still clutched an item taken out of the void. A book. Grayed. Aged. Burnt. Handwritten. Yet legible. He thought to toss it, then, paused. He returned to the cove where the raft and the net remained. There he sat and read. A strange kind of magic happened - suddenly, words written and abandoned ages ago spoke...

* * *

It was not my intent to be a focus of controversy. As a historian at Ba Sing Se, I was more interested with tenure than conspiracy, let alone to anger the occult 'White Lotus'. It was by accident that I discovered Fire Lord Zuko's journal; all I wanted to do was investigate the events that accompanied Lady Ursa's disappearance.

Yet, with that journal, curiosity and a supreme if academic urge to know the truth mixed to lead me through a pathway into this, the destination of ruin. Following the publication of my discovery, the last few years of my life have been strained to be kind, not only because of the backlash spurred by colleagues but also because of the actions of the mysterious 'White Lotus'. Both intend to silence and discredit me to rebury the evidence.

It is to thwart their efforts that I again retreat into the wilds of Ember. That I, again, write, pen to paper, free of the interference of the world. While my book has been confiscated and burnt by agents of the NRO. While my voice has been tainted. I know that at the Island my testament is destined to endure through the ages, to remain, undisturbed, across spans of centuries, to wait for those removed from the trivial body of politic to find and appreciate it.

History - is the subject of those who follow.

My journey started with a quest to uncover the secret of Lady Ursa's disappearance. Ursa, as it is known, was the wife of Ozai. Ozai was elevated at his father's death - which, coincidentally, occurred at his wife's exile. Fire Lord Ozai was the third and final warlord and a particularly excessively cruel figure universally reviled beyond the borders of the Fire Nation.

I did not understand the extent of the madness that consumed the man and the women throughout his life. Nor the murders. Nor the atrocities. The unspeakable practiced even against children. I was not aware of the journal at the onset of my quest, therefore, ignorant of that facet of history.

After Lady Ursa's disappearance, she was blotted out of history, especially with respect to the members of the court. The esteemed Iroh, who had been skipped in favor of Ozai, did not speak of the woman directly. That unprecedented erasure of fact, coupled with the mysterious death of Fire Lord Azulon, meant there was an effort to hide a secret. And that led me to conclude Ursa and Ozai together killed Azulon.

They were husband and wife. It would have been natural as a pair, beset by ambition, to plot such an act. Iroh was aged and childless after Lu Ten's death. While they were younger and blessed with two firebending children. It was known that Azulon was inflexible when it came to tradition - especially succession - despite the opinions of advisors who were displeased with Iroh's failure at Ba Sing Se.

A popular theory I wanted to test centered on the idea that if Ursa killed Azulon, she acted alone. I knew it was a troublesome, problematic theory despite its entrenched nature. The crux of the matter was that Ursa was not a firebender while Azulon was the Fire Lord. She would have needed help to kill the man. My thesis was that Ursa and Ozai acted in concert. Then, after the deed was done, it was the wife who fell while the husband walked. Which begged the question - why did Ursa agree to such a one-sided, nihilistic arrangement (the exile)? Was it a double-cross by Ozai?

Regardless, Ursa was exiled, Ozai was elevated. That Iroh was skipped without protest indicated that other players with rank were already attached to Ozai's cult of personality. Indeed, they could have been part of a wider kind of conspiracy.

I came to Ember Island, the epicenter of the event, to find proof of what occurred - if any existed. After a hundred years of change, it was common to believe such proof did not exist and I, too, suspected from time to time that the evidence was extinct. The chance of success improved, however, when I learned that the house at the beach remained intact.

Fire Lord Zuko used the house at the beach as a residence through the bulk of his reign. It was abandoned after his death and the fall of the dynasty. Then, after the vacuum of power that followed Avatar Aang's death, the world was 'united' by the upheaval known as the Great Republic Event.

In the wake of revolution, everything associated with royalty became 'taboo', to be either suppressed or destroyed. The Fie Nation was not immune to that disease. It was tempered, though, as important palaces and cities were officially kept as relics by the provinces.

Thankfully, Zuko's residence was left untouched both by revolutionaries and nationalists.

It was willful if benign neglect that Zuko's residence remained untouched yet that did not mean the authorities were eager for a historian (of the Earth Kingdom) to poke about the wound it represented. I needed to be cautious. Armed with a map etched by Sokka that I found at the archive I explored the wilderness. Evading the patrols of guards. Averting the eyes of locals. I found the trail that snaked toward the beach. There, in the middle of the night, as Ember Island roared with festivity, and I with curiosity, there stood at the apex of fate the great Fire Lord's house.

It was a skeleton with a shell of facade - the eroded nature of the abode proved to be both a blessing and a curse.

Zuko was the only member of royalty who spoke of his mother. To find the woman he searched the world over and over. Ironically, he always found the Avatar, not his mother. In a lot of ways, beyond that swell of post GRE romanticism, Zuko was a tragic, lonely figure.

Now, that I walked the house at the beach back and forth and back and forth, I started to think of Zuko the man. I started to wonder what it used to be like then and there in that residence, in that past. I suspected that his five decade rule meant he held the key to unravel the mystery. It must have been there, there, there in the depths of that house. I searched that tell tale clue I hoped would be scattered about the rubble.

As I meditated within his study - what remained of it - my mind wandered toward his tragic and short marriage to Mai. A very unhappy kind of marriage whose climax was death. This ultimately led to the fall of the dynasty. The strange part of it was that they loved each other. Zuko was utterly, undyingly devoted to Mai before and after the marriage - so much so that he did not remarry. Clearly, a factor beyond their relationship was the cause of their unhappiness. Whatever it could have been, I thought, it was not the focus of my work.

Zuko and Mai were even-tempered, morose and aloof, and not a part of the scene of the youth. They arrived at that common state of mind through very different avenues. Zuko's melancholy stemmed out of the torment he suffered at the hands of his family. Mai, though, could not be cracked. It was impossible to explain the root of her prolonged, negative behavior.

She, through her own and many other accounts, came out of a tight and happy - well-to-do - family.

She was driven into madness - how, I wondered.

It came to me - Azula was mad. Ty Lee and Mai were also touched by that from time to time.

At the center of the game was Zuko; and his sister and company were insane.

My reaction was that Azula was the true nexus of evil - tormenting Ty Lee and Mai. She drove them man. She caused their rebellion. Which, itself, spurred her downfall.

Then - I found the journal.

It was supposed to be my last day of investigation. I was about to call the affair a failure. Such as it was, I walked from room to room across the courtyard, accidentally, I stepped onto and fell through a hatch. I tumbled into a chamber, filled with rubble, which was a part of the basement. Wind must have brushed the sand off of its cover. Rain must have weakened it structure.

As I climbed out of the hole, I caught a glimpse of it. A glint of metal. It was the tip of a scroll that jetted out of the debris. I found it to be whole, more or less, accompanied by the fragments of parchments that disintegrated to my touch.

I scrambled out of the trap and into the study. Stirred by discovery, I worked without water and food, without a care. There I remained until I finished the documentation of the journal.

A part of me wishes I had not been so diligent. Maybe if a cloud had blocked the sun. If I had looked here, not there. Grasped this, not that. If a million little pieces could have broken a million different ways then any of those alterations would have spared me the infamy of what happened next. True, I would have failed the thesis, I would not be as scorned (and hunted) as I am.

Of course he was obsessed with his mother.

The Avatar and company spent years tracking rumors, searching and searching, looking at any trace of evidence. Several times along the way Sokka posited that, if she lived, she did not want to be found. Although Zuko rejected it, eventually, that theory settled, as he could not accept she was dead. Better to yield that she wanted to be incognito than to accept that she was dead thus forever, eternally gone. The side-effect of that compromise was depression. He was aged, if not by time then by burden, the thought of abandonment added another dimension of shame.

The burden of office was unbearable. There were a great many times when it seemed as if the country verged into chaos. There were those of the navy and the army still beholden to Ozai and loyal to the vision of Shozin. Every now and then forces plotted to return the world to that madman. Yet, without the Avatar, Zuko quelled those hostilities. When he died, though, that restraint evaporated and the Fire Nation fell into a war that only the victory of the GRE ended.

The volume revealed the truth that Zuko made a point to visit and ask his father about his mother. It was a pattern of behavior that repeated, again and again, as long as his family lived. The tome exposed the evidence that he was not the only member of royalty to visit the prison. It detailed events regarding Mai's many clandestine visitations with the family, where witnesses said the condemned stirred various states of sanity. Until that night when everything was swallowed by whirlwind.

Through that journal Zuko related a history to posterity - a secret he uncovered about his family. He was digging, deep and deep, into areas he was not prepared to fathom. I should have known then and there the information was going to be trouble.

He knew that Mai was visiting Ozai and Azula - why, though, was not that simple.

Scanning the entries, day-by-day, the truth behind the insanity was coming into focus.

Zuko questioned everything about his life before and after his banishment. Mostly, he wondered why he lived, why he had been allowed to return. And why Mai, a member of a well-to-do and connected family, was engaged with Fire Lord Ozai's unwanted and disgraced son. He already understood his father was a sadist of the worse order. He exiled his mother. He may or may not have killed his grand-father. He scarred his face at the age of 12. As he probed the situation, he realized his father's dimension of cruelty was impossible to imagine, staggering and overwhelming. Yet there it emerged, through a twisted and demented mania, the fact was that he was allowed to live simply to be a source of amusement.

If his father had been just ruthless, he would have been killed already to assure the favorite, Azula, was guaranteed the throne.

Instead he lived, therefore, the conclusion was inescapable.

A life with Mai was supposed to be an instrument of torture. How that was intended to be a sting, though, remained a mystery until the very last breath of marriage. In what way was Mai a curse? When they loved each other intensely? When they scarified everything for that love? If pain was Ozai's drive then there was something about Mai that Zuko was not yet aware of.

Ozai's fetish encompassed not only his own urges but consumed the lives of everyone around him. Zuko formed a nexus and what a center of evil it was. All of the man's actions were designed to maximize the boy's sufferings. Removing Ursa. Favoring Azula. So again and again Zuko returned to the point - why was he allowed the pleasure of a relationship with Mai?

I concluded that a part of the Zuko/Mai relationship was tainted by Ozai - it was the only solution of the problem that fit the pattern - yet I dismissed the entire train of thought.

I tended to dismiss the work as the insecure and emotional outbursts of a youth.

How was Ozai torturing Zuko through Mai? It seemed to be the paranoia common among the abused oozing through the surface. Ozai rushed the two into an engagement, which was almost as permanent as marriage. To undo it would have brought the parties a great amount of shame. Maybe it was a ploy, a way for Mai to funnel information to Azula.

Was such a game beneath Ozai? I could not say to be honest...

A month after the war, Zuko and Mai were wedded by Aang. At that time a baby was observed as part of the entourage. A few talked about that infant, who reflected a resemblance to the children of Ozai. What the court knew with certainty was that Mai was not pregnant before or after the marriage, indeed, she confessed to infertility. The child's name trickled through rumor as Kuzon; it was said that the Avatar named the boy.

Zuko and Mai did not keep the child with them after the fourth year of marriage. Instead, at that age, the boy was circulated among Aang and Katara, later among Sokka and Toph. Eventually Kuzon was watched by the Kyoshi Warriors - which unhinged Ty Lee.

When the child exhibited a power to bend fire, he returned to the royals. A new though subtle role was found to fit the boy. Zuko was fond of bringing Kuzon into meetings with hostile quarters of navy and army personnel. The very look of the boy quelled everyone. Kuzon, it was noted, was a symbol that they understood meant the past was not going to return.

Zuko grew to fear the child and letters were sent to Aang asking the Avatar to neutralize the boy. We do not know if the request was met. Even the journal does not say what happened, however, bits and pieces of the truth are inferred elsewhere. The journal makes states that beyond the age of manhood Kuzon was not see again. The name was stricken out of the record. Still, long, long after these events - when Zuko sat to write the diary - the boy remained a scab that would not heal.

Yes, Zuko's journal was a treasure of information. How it filled the gaps left by textbooks. We always knew Ozai and Azula died early in Zuko's rein and more or less at the together. We always suspected (incorrectly) that they had been murdered by ancient, pre-GRE activists. The journal illuminated the truth and provided a timeline and, at last, revealed the origin of Kuzon.

Everything was uncovered by Zuko and none of it was what he expected it to be.

A storm brew that evening while I devoured the journal. I recall it as if it were yesterday. The crash of thunder. The spark of lightning. It felt as if an avalanche of water was about to wipe away the universe. I wondered if the house gasped its last word with me inside. I fancied the twisted joy of dying and becoming history - just like the late Professor Zei.

I read while Zuko conspired to uncover the truth.

Zuko, the Fire Lord, gained access to much of Ozai's effects. What he was after, though, was not the kind of information that would have been written into a book and stuffed into a desk, waiting for eyes to read it. Knowing his father, if the information existed anywhere out of his head, it would have been hidden yet displayed, ready to be enjoyed only by those who knew where to look and what to find.

He haunted his father's chambers, looking for evidence of something, anything, to point a way forward. He had been so upset by the man and the events of his ascension that those parts of the palace remained abandoned for years and years. Now, as he strolled through room after room, passages he was not allowed into since boyhood, it was like a stroll through an era, untouched, unchanged, exactly as it was after Ozai left.

There was little of value to be found yet the Fire Lord was determined to raze that palace.

Zuko worked alone - Mai refused to help - tearing at room after room. At last he discovered doorway behind a shelf. It was not locked and lead into an antechamber that did not appear within the plan. When Zuko announced that discovery it started Mai's reliance on alcohol. It also started the woman's visits to that prison as well as the point where Kuzon was set abroad.

Behind that doorway Zuko found a bed - it was a mess and appeared scorched by fire. The walls and the ceiling were dusted by soot. The floor was littered by his father's clothes as well as other, familiar garments.

An examination of the bed revealed ash - mounds and mounds of ash. He combed through that ash and uncovered a fragment of a bone. He flung the cot and found the most terrifying, horrifying sight yet - he screamed and it alerted the guards.

There, the floor the bed covered, was a basin. A wide, shallow tub without a drain. At the center of it was a pile of ash shaped like a girl.

Aside from that display were scraps of clothes. Armor set aside that he recognized as the kind his sister wore. Another item that he could not identify appeared familiar, still, it looked like a necklace Mai used to wear under her cloak. It was a symbol of maidenhood - a piece popular with ladies of the court. Something Lo and Li wore every now and then.

When Zuko showed the jewel to Mai she wept and thrust it into a fire.

Mai confused Zuko with that reaction. He theorized that the article belonged to a girl they knew at school. There was very little chance that the owner of the necklace did not leave the chamber alive. The rest of the evidence simply confirmed what he suspected about his father and hinted at the origin of the child, Kuzon.

He concluded that the antechamber was a kind of sadistic bondage dungeon and that Ozai and Azula together partook of its secret. And - as if without a grasp of subtlety - he revealed that he learned that Azula was pregnant after her imprisonment. Until then Kuzon's parentage was unknown, if thought about. The standard historical picture was that the child was an orphan of war adopted by the royals. In truth it was a great guilt made of flesh whose exposure threatened the efforts of those who wanted Ozai's return.

At that point Zuko and I wondered what the court knew about the activities...

He wanted to sweep the matter under the rug but guilt about those killed overcame that judgment. Records were searched and indicated that girls belonging to upper level commanders vanished without a trace. They were not reported missing. Also, those tragedies were followed by promotions. Including Zhao, whose lost two girls prior to his promotion, two boys after the Blue Spirit re-captured the Avatar.

Zuko suspected that the tribute offered by the ambitious was not enough to satisfy the urge. That opened the door for Azula and company to act as bait and lure children into that chamber. A wider search netted reports about commoners with missing children, usually though not commonly, girls.

He did not want to think of Ty Lee and Mai as henchmen for Ozai. If anyone was a true conspirator it was Azula. Still, the thought lingered...and more and more explained Mai's overreaction.

Zuko's relationship with Mai did not recover. But time and time again he dismissed the breakdown as caused by Kuzon. And the fact that she was infertile - a topic she refused to elaborate. The truth was that he should have known at that point yet it was easier to blame the offspring of evil than face a reality too gruesome to consider.

Kuzon was sent abroad as a kind of exile with the support of the court as an effort to save the marriage. However, the boy proved to be as crazed as the parentage and soon became too much to handle. Politically, it was too dangerous to give the child to a Fire Nation citizen, so after the death of Mai and the depression of Zuko, the court shipped the teenager away.

Little could be said about Kuzon after the tragedy that marked the deaths of so many. Except a letter attached to the scroll which elaborated a few points regarding the matter. It is entirely possible that the boy survived the purges of the GRE. Although, as I printed, the White Lotus, dominated by anti-GRE nationalists, kidnapped the child in a failed attempt to re-established the monarchy.

At the lowest point of the marriage, Zuko grew curious about Mai's visits to that prison which kept his family. He vacillated about her intentions, sure and not sure, about who she met, what she said. He struggled to keep his misgivings hidden to keep safe the secret that he knew about the excursions.

Instead, with skill honed by exile, Zuko tracked Mai.

It was the middle of the night. A storm brew, its anger rattled the building, its chill filled the air. I tightened my jacket as I read the account of what happened.

Zuko watched Mai trek through the passages. The corridors were were vacant as if abandoned. She did not go to Azula's cell, rather, she ventured to Ozai's cell.

He recounted, shocked, at the way she entered. It was not the first time she visited the father lord. Doubtless. It was not the first time she came with such vitriol and annoyance.

He snuck into the cell adjacent Ozai's - its prisoner was asleep within its cage. He scaled the wall. He gazed through the vent. A pile connected the cells of the blocks and through it he heard more than he saw, save what the strokes of the storm revealed.

"You, again, Mai?" He acted as if the visit was not a surprise. "Are you ready to be finished?"

"Kuzon is dead," she seethed like a reptile.

"Hm, a tit for tat, pity, everything ends with Zuko."

"Bastard," she whispered through a voice that despite its strength did not betray emotion. "He knows about the chamber. About the girls and the boys. He knows everything."

"He knows about you?"

"He knows more than you think he knows...he found Ursa."

There was a pause, which echoed beyond the loudest blast of thunder.

"Liar," now it was Ozai who seethed. The monster laughed, while Zuko wept at the bravery of the woman. He wrote that he never loved Mai more than then and there at that instant. "I am the master, I gave you to torture Zuko. Insurance... Because I set the precedent! The childless does not inherit the throne. But with you it was supposed to be more than that...much, much more than that. And imagine it - did he not wonder about your lack of blood...or...did your family explain that too?"

"Prick - mud soaked blood is what you are - life is nothing to you!"

"Oh, no, no, on, life is everything to me. Living, is the greatest torture is it not? We are too great a coward to end it. Aren't we? The flesh is weak. How I know it. Soon - how you know it..."

A flash followed the threat.

"Didn't you hear it? Feel it? Through the storm? Was it the crack of thunder or the crash of bars? Was it the prison shaking or the stirring of footsteps falling closer and closer? Bitch!" he lunged at the cage. "I marked you and I will do it again!"

"Impossible - the Avatar -"

"No me. Not me."

Zuko looked again as Ozai laughed - then the doorway collapsed.

"Mai!" he screamed - then fell, then crashed. Against the floor. It was agony to rise and lurch toward the exit while Mai screamed and Ozai laughed and somebody, somebody cackled 'no, no, no'!

Zuko reached the cell with Mai and Ozai - it was too late to stop its breach - instead he rushed through the embers of its doorway.

The 'no no no' rang through his ears mixing with the rage of the thunder. The struggle at the cage, which had been demolished, hypnotized with its flickering, dancing silhouette. It was a flash of the lightning that revealed it was a fight. Time slowed except Mai, unnaturally, appeared to speed toward that scene. Another outburst of storm and he was stopped, transfixed, by the sight of his father, staggering and falling onto the cot while his sister plunged atop. Lets wrapped waists. Arms clasped shoulders. Azula, naked, bucked like an animal.

Zuko reached Mai - as that spectacle debuted a new and disturbed feature. It was a glow unlike that of the storm. It was a fire that erupted out of Azula - out of the vagina of Azula! Sparks of tiny, electric flame burst out of his sister between her legs. It shot onto Ozai as they tumbled about as a single band of flesh, connected by fire, with legs and arms flailing.

The cell filled with smoke as the fire spread and spread - like a veil it cloaked the pair's orgy of rapture and agony.

Zuko grasped Mai by the sleeve of the coat.

"I am not a coward, Ozai, as Azula attests. You do not win! I take away your victory over Zuko. We will not live with your torment. Ozai - the flesh - it is not weak - it is strong like fire!"

Zuko watched, helpless, as a child...arm outstretched weak and feeble...unable to stop Mai jump onto that ball of fire and flesh and became one with his family...

I was shocked. I wished there had been another extant page of journal. Alas, that segment of diary was burnt, its tantalizing glimpse of history was lost.

I never uncovered the truth about the Lady Ursa's fate. The only fact that stands out in my mind is that letter from the warden of Boiling Rock Prison. Zuko trusted that man intensely and may have been the figure who kept Kuzon out of the public. The letter was no doubt written after Mai's death, as suggested by the tone. It talked about Mai's fragile state of mind after Zuko's exile then after the Fire Lord took an interest with her and the family in general. Nobody wanted to speak of the...infertility was verified by a captured water tribe healer...the nature of the injury was internal and very much scarred. The Boiling Rock Prison is active therefore attempts to...

* * *

The fisherman flipped the book as withered, dusted fragments of pages sprinkled onto the water. The rest of the work was too eroded to understand. It seemed to continue but the words, so faded, so dimmed, could not be read. Time, it appeared, conspired to keep veiled the rest of the history. He thought about tossing the material, then, looked at its spine and paused...

**END**


End file.
